December bling, with golden eagle

The last journal quilt of the year, in a nod to seasonal bling, is golden eagle.

Three layers of wadding in the trapunto, and I think this is the most successful amount to use to give volume without distorting the appliqué shape.

Abstraction

I have signed up again to take part in the Contemporary Quilt Group monthly challenge.  The size this year is 7" x 9", in landscape format.  I've been dithering about for weeks deciding on a theme, not helped by the fact that group members post their pieces for viewing on Yahoo, and the platform seems to be broken. There are therefore very few finished pieces to look at to spur me on.

However, the snow paralysis n the UK gave me time to think, and I've decided that my theme will be "abstracting nature".

Taking the gannet photos from the art class as inspiration, ( I love watching gannets), I have worked on abstracting what, for me, makes them distinctive: the sharp, streamlined shape as the enter the water; the blue highlight around their eyes; the yellow neck feathers.

Sketching out ideas, and trying to explore geometry in my sketchbook, leading to an almost finished piece.  I'm still deciding on whether this needs more quilting and will add a two colour binding to disguise the wonky geometry of the two  triangles at the side.

Other creative tasks were knitting a hat with beautiful yarn found in a charity shop. It's a lovely hat, but it is not a good look for me, so it is off to a local charity who are collecting warm clothing for homeless people.

Drawing and domesticity

The art tutor took us to see a free exhibition of work, mostly drawings, by Maggi Hambling at the British Museum, called ‘Touch’. Maggi Hambling divides opinion, but I like a lot of her work particularly the Scallop sculpture. The exhibition is on until 29 January 2017.
Photography is allowed.  The intent of the visit was for us to study Hambling’s mark making and to study, through copying, those marks. As some of the work was mono printing, that was difficult to do, however just looking at the range of marks on the print of this figure was inspiring.

There are some very touching drawings of her friends and family close to death.

My own attempt at that figure, head and hand. Nowhere near, but closer than I was 2 years ago.

The next week, a replacement tutor catapulted us in to portraiture -aaarrrggghhh!. After I calmed myself down, I’m pleased with this ( A2 size, charcoal and chalk on a coloured paper), as it is recognisable as the sitter, though he said I had made him look much younger.

Stitching for the past few weeks has been very domestic.
Replacement curtains and cushions for the bedroom to replace the “temporary” curtains and cushions that had been put in 22 years ago. After 21 years of family life, including the dog choosing one of the cushions as his favoured favoured window-viewing spot, they finally had to go.
The pattern matching along the front of the past of cushions took much measuring and swearing to get correct.



Inherited Ercol chairs have arrive in our house ( let’s say that ours have more of the patina of age about them). Their cushions were also in a sorry state, so while my piping skills were honed by the 30 degree corners on the bedroom cushions, I could tackle four replacements for these. Not in the original style, but a lot more comfortable.

The swan has also been finished. Faced rather than bound and waiting for the right wall space to show it to advantage.

Seven year stitch?

UFO clearing is a good thing to do when creative energy is in short supply, but is going back to a project that was started 7 years ago a good idea in this situation?  The answer was yes, when it is this swan, started 7 years ago, in a workshop with Ferret.

I got stuck on this as I was going to appliqué some leaves into the corner, but couldn’t get the scale of the leaves to my liking.

A cycle along the river ( the only benefit of visiting my relative with the stroke) gave inspiration of just stitching on lines of stitch to suggest the winter threads of willow branches.

A greenish, variegated thread from the stand looked like a good mix of colours.

Trying to apply some of my new knowledge about tone, I also added some darker stitch down one side of the variegated thread and some lighter stitch down the other side. The Bernina edge-stitch foot is a great tool for precision stitching.

  

I need to stitch more lines and to decide whether to stitch in the thread ends or sew them in.

 

Alice's leftovers

……trying to make sure that all leftovers are transformed in to something useful, I’ve been working on the scraps from the Alice in Wonderland quilt.  Triangles and strips,put together at random, quilted with close lines, and 4 appliqué hearts added.  Just needs blocking and binding.

Quilting progress on a gloomy Sunday afternoon

Backing, bought at the bric-a-brac stall at our exhibition

Border quilting experimenting with inverting programmed, decorative stitches on the machine

Quilting in the body of the quilt

Appliqued corners

and a little postcard, sent for a German birthday.

 

First swifts, summer is on the way

Saw and heard my first swifts yesterday, what joy.

Flying home today

NSW Quilt Show 2014

Any day at a quilt show that starts with these blues seen from the boat to the show is going to be good.

The NSW Quilt Show certainly was a great day out - although the new venue was very cold.  I took too many photos, so have linked to them here.  Not surprisingly, many of the quilts featured incredible applique, Australian plants and Australian birds.  The winners are shown on this link.  Many of the quilts, although not many of the winners, used paint and pencil techniques on their entries.  I was particularly taken with one of those, by Lois Parish-Evans,  in the "Living Colour" exhibit, curated by Brenda Gael Smith, which had been quilted, and then coloured after the quilting, leading to incredible contrast between the quilted and non-quilted area.

I got a chance to say hello to Kathy Doughty of Material Obsessions fame, and to meet the fun and charming Mollisparkles, who has a great free tutorial on how to make a pieced Union Jack block.  Too bad I don't have my sewing machine here.

Firsts of the season

Away in Norfolk this week, and a few firsts of the year:

Swifts

Asparagus

Cromer crab

and a quilt block in a black and blue project, inspired by this book 

 

Trees and feathers

The deadline for the textile piece to be submitted to the Made at Morley exhibition is next Tuesday, therefore yesterday was the last full day in the studio to get the pieces of cloth ready.  I thnk it is there, but the final reveal needs to wait a bit yet.

I am really pleased with the colours, shapes and patterns on these fabrics.

I have also been practising quilted, freehand feathers, using two different methods.  This is the back of the quilt, about 42 x 50 inches I think.

Bump back method - needs more practice

Double-tracking - is that the right term?

and feather of a different kind to be attracted to these new bird houses near Morley.

 

 

Papercuts and first swift

Time to make a new print screen at Morley. During this years's "creative journey" ( is that too pretentious?) I am coming to realise that I am more comfortable with collage, paper and scalpel than I am with pen,pencil and paint. Some random cuts on black paper this week led to a collection of shapes - plankton? jelly-fish? unicellular forms? krill? Pics will follow when I work out how to get them to the Mac from my phone.

Also stuck on my phone are some dyeing experiments: indigo strips from last week over dyed in the tray with blue / turquoise and brown Procion MX; indigo pre-dyed, then clamped with CDs and over dyed with blue / turquoise Procion MX; yellowish curtain lining over dyed with blue and bronx , with has copout looking ilk camouflage fabric.

In the meantime, I saw my first swift of the spring today, summer must be coming. Photo from the BBC nature blog site.

Two birds for two boys

Details of centre quilting

Detail of border quilting

Centre front panel showing detail of quilting ( photographed before final embroidery of bird details)

 

Pieced back ( against the advice of Plum, sorry!)

 

Front, abut 48 x 60 inches.

This quilt has been a long time in the making. It is a gift for my artist friend, in exchange for pencil portraits of my sons.  I did have two abortive starts on this gift, and both of those semi-complete tops are now in the ongoing project pile.  The central panel is from  a design in Material Obsession, with the tree trunk made from a horded piece of Joel Dewberry woodgrain fabric. Then I randomly pieced many, many rectangles in green and yellow.  I did not have enough of the light green leaf fabric for the back, so decided to make a pieced background, against all advice.

Free machine quilted with a selection of threads, mostly Bottomline, and with bird-related sayings quilted into the dark green inner border ( not seen well on this photo).  Other quilting patterns were either quilted without marking or drawn freehand and were inspired by Philippa Naylor.  Binding was embroidered as shown in the last post.

It looks a bit puffy in the bottom photograph, but it doesn’t in real life.

I’ve loved every minute of making this quilt, hope you enjoy it, Tracey.

2009 - project that can be shown now

This major project took a lot of my time in 2009, but I couldn't show it as it was a Christmas present for my brother and sister-in-law. This is called "Birds and Words" for obvious reasons, and fabrics and design were chosen to match their interests and occupations. The pattern is based on a design from the book " Material Obsession" . The realistic bark fabric is from Joel Dewberry and the words fabric is from Michael Miller, strangely enough called " Oh Dick" - I think someone in the marketing department was not doing a full web search on this phrase when they named this fabric.

There is a lot of hand applique on this, and oddly enough for me, I enjoyed this. As ever, the quilt grew in the making and involved a new technique for me, curved borders, done using the stacking method.

Free machine quilted with squiggles, words and leaves, shown in the detail photo.

Stitching with my son

My son went to the Wetlands Centre with school this week and had to write, make or draw something inspired by the visit. As I wanted to do something with fabric, I persuaded him that we could adapt the logo for the centre into a fabric picture.

We used bondaweb, (and failed miserably at the mirror image, copy it backwards, and reverse it again thing that you have to do with bondaweb, particularly when you want to use both sides of the fabric).

He did very well at the cutting out and ironing on. We did a bit of a 3D effect by leaving the tops of the grasses free from the backing fabric. He then stitched round the edge with a metallic thread. the backing fabric is a lovely piece I got at the Region 1 bring and buy last weekend. I love the ripply effect on this.